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Soulver "plain English" calculator



Just yesterday we posted on the bc command line calculator. Well on the other end of the UI spectrum is Soulver from Acqualia Software. Its authors claim that Soulver is a "plain English" calculator in that you can actually type in certain (in fact very limited) phrases and get answers, as you see above. In general, though, you'll use Soulver as a normal sort of calculator, but with a pleasing, easy to read interface. The expressions to be evaluated go on in the left column and the answers appear in the right, all in a nice clean list. As you can see, you can also open a couple of palettes with conversions and statistics on the entire column. Perhaps ironically, the actual number crunching power under the pretty GUI is the same bc mentioned above. Soulver is not meant to be a particularly sophisticated scientific calculator (though you can define variables, for instance), but rather a kind of "back of the envelope" replacement. It's an unusual concept, but once you get your mind around the idea of it not looking like a stand-alone calculator, I actually think the paradigm works well (and I put my own money where my mouth is on this one).

Soulver is $17.95 and a demo is available.

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Software Odds and ends

Just yesterday we posted on the bc command line calculator. Well on the other end of the UI spectrum is Soulver from Acqualia Software. Its...
 

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Michael May

hey that's pretty damn cool. but should be cheaper/free.

April 26 2007 at 5:46 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dmitry Kirillov

Well actually Google does this well too. And so does my widget - zGoogleCalculator, which uses google to make all the calculations. :)

April 26 2007 at 7:45 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Graham Cox

Should it present the answer as "three hundred and thirty-three thousand, three hundred and thirty three point three three recurring"? (Just to add to its lack of usability/usefulness)

April 26 2007 at 1:18 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
derek

i got it for free from MacHeist, so I love it ;)

April 25 2007 at 5:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Owain

So $18 for a calculator that's more complicated and harder to use than the built-in one? Take my money, please.

April 25 2007 at 4:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jay

integral of 7x to the power of 4 with respect to x

Google didn't seem to like it... they're slacking.

April 25 2007 at 2:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
tuaw

Nice. Except that Google already does this:
http://www.google.com/search?q=a+third+of+a+million

April 25 2007 at 12:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Peter Skelton

This was a freebie from MacHeist as well. Rather good.

April 25 2007 at 11:56 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
dan2ktj

Is "1000000 ÷ 3 =" really that difficult to enter into a calculator?

If so, you have no business calculating mathematic problems in the first place. Stick to the kindness of strangers to solve your exact change needs.

For $17.95 I'll exercise the brain I have, once in a while.

April 25 2007 at 11:41 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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